In communication networks, and especially wireless communication networks, there is a need for wireless communication devices such as mobile phones to be able to communicate wirelessly even when outside its home communication network, i.e. the communication network belonging to an operator to which a user of the wireless communication device has a subscription.
For this reason there are roaming agreements between different wireless communication networks to allow a wireless communication device belonging to a home network to roam into a visiting network to which the wireless communication device does not have a subscription.
Also, in the 5th generation mobile communication systems and in vertical business segment use-cases as described in Next Generation Mobile Network, NGMN, www.NGMN.org 5G white paper, a solution is required that works in a multi-operator environment.
A traditional solution to achieve that a device can roam into a visiting network is to use roaming as specified in 3GPP TS 23.401, or shared networks solutions as specified in 3GPP TS 23.251, or a Gateway Core Network, GWCN, solution or a Multi-Operator Core Network, MOCN, solution. However, those solutions require a number of dedicated business agreements between the networks that initially takes a long time to establish, and, as a consequence has a long time to adopt to changes.
The complexity in business agreements is about “Who pays for extra capacity investments, possibly including management and operations of the same in the other operator's network?” and “Who pays for the common assets of investments into a GPRS roaming exchange, GRX, network?” The GRX network acts as a hub for GPRS connections for roaming users, removing the need for a dedicated link between the wireless networks. Also there need to be an agreement on how fairness is solved regarding how to control resource usage between the operators of different networks. The cost could be divided into two parts, hardware, HW, capacity investments and in software, SW, licenses. In traditional node products, the cost for the operators is a combined cost with licenses on the node based on # user and capacity needs, so when accepting traffic from other operators into your own network this will also drive an increased cost and that the operator has to make earlier investments to upgrade capacity than was originally planned. So a way to minimize cost impacts for the operators to be able to provide roaming to wireless devices would be of high value.